House of Steel
by Xeno Major
Summary: The world of Remnant sucks. It's a nightmare that pretends to be normal... at its fundamental core, it is not safe. It's about time that someone changed that. Like anything worth the effort, it will take years, if not decades of work. But that doesn't change the inevitable. Upon this rock, I will build my house. Self Insert.
1. Chapter 1

I've always been a little blunt, so let me speak bluntly.

Remnant sucks. It's a nightmare that pretends to be normal, like a father lying to his kids about why their mother isn't around anymore.

Oh, the cities were fine enough, I suppose. The central cities of the Four Kingdoms of Vale, Vacuo, Mistral and Atlas… those places were safe and normal, and almost resemble the cities of my home. But there was always an undercurrent running through it, a lingering trace of fear. There were alarm sirens at every corner, waiting to blare out a warning. Wide avenues, designed less for traffic and more for evacuation routes. It's like Cadia tried to pretend to be normal, but forgot to put away the bunkers.

It's the towns that give the game away. The tiny little places, the rural areas, the homes of the down-to-earth and the idealistic… at least, on Earth, that is. Here on Remnant, the small towns were for the serious, hard-eyed folks, and the cities were for the idealists and the kind-hearted citizens. Towns and settlements outside the city walls were wary, cautious places, where everyone walks armed, and mothers keep their children in sight at all times. A gun on every hip, an enemy around every shadowed corner.

Because at its fundamental core, Remnant is not safe.

Perhaps it will be one day, after the Kingdoms man up enough to napalm all the forests and burn out all the Grimm, after they manage to finally get off the ground and into space. For right now, it's a dangerous place to live – wolves in the woods, trolls under the bridges, dragons in the caves, kraken under the seas, and something _big_ lurking in the upper atmosphere.

The continents didn't crack apart on their own, on this world. Their Moon didn't shatter of its own volition. Every time someone reaches to new heights, touches a new technology or strives to change the world for the better, they get smacked right back down by the hand of God. The Tower of Babel never got off the ground floor on this world – it was strangled in the cradle, and its destroyers still linger in the ruins.

To those who understand this truth, that the world hates them, there is but one goal: to try to live out their lives as best they can. This isn't the kind of place where a child dreams of touching the stars, or becoming President, or anything like that. Here, they dream of starting families and having warm, secure homes.

They dream of living, yes, but that is not the full truth. They dream of not being killed. Of not dying to the monsters. The children lie awake in their beds in the dark of night, and fear the thought of death, creeping through their homes.

Some of those homes happen to be outside the walls of the Kingdom, and that's where I come in.

I'm a mercenary. I fight for money, though I'll make exceptions for children with frightened faces. I escort supply shipments to wayward outposts and small settlements. Sometimes the shipments were legal, and my contract is paid for by the Kingdom of Vale or the Kingdom of Vacuo, or the like… and sometimes, I skirt alongside the edge of the law, bringing food and medicine to the enclaves of outlaws and smugglers and worse.

It's complicated. I'm a moral person, or at least I tell myself that I am, and to work for criminals irks me, like a bone-deep itch of _wrong_. But if I want to survive in this world, I need money, because money buys power and freedom. Once I have that power, I can get around to changing this place, to making it better.

Because you see, there's a bit of a problem with Remnant. With Vale and Mistral, and Vacuo in particular.

People don't care.

The more generations grow up behind large, protecting walls, the more they think of themselves as untouchable, as _safe_. And to be frank, that condition doesn't exist on this miserable pile of dirt. Safe is temporary. The Grimm were a never-ending enemy, spawning behind walls and in pits and in the dark and deep places of the world. They stride forth eternally, stalking the hairless apes of Man, until one day they finally kill the last one off, and hunt us into extinction.

And I don't like that thought.

So far as I can tell, with only the knowledge given to me by the basic Intranet of Vale with a civilian level of access, there is only one known way to prevent Grimm from spawning.

You need humans. Specifically, humans living together, in a community. Thinking that they were safe, treating the place as their home. There's never been a Grimm spawning or appearing – whatever they actually do to reproduce, that is – inside of the Cities, inside of the Walls. They have to come from outside, from the unknown, from the darkness. Even the act of thinking of something as safe, as protected, can help deter the Grimm from attacking. It's a threshold, of a sort. The longer you live there, the more 'home' the place is, the stronger the effect.

I think it's the only time I've ever been in favor of overpopulation, but damn if it doesn't fit. Let's all have a million babies, and start that slow spreading of our borders. Ba Sing Se is the ideal here – gigantic, continent spanning cities, with high and thick walls, and with the inability of any Grimm to appear within it. Build the walls, and push them steadily, slowly outwards.

Until the walls keep the monsters safe from _us_.

There's probably a better solution somewhere, hidden beneath a conspiracy or a government cover-up, but that's the instantly obvious solution to me. To make Remnant safe, to eradicate the Grimm, we need to increase the desire to move, to spread, to settle, and we need to increase the birthrates and get the population booming. We need, as cliché as it is, a Manifest Destiny of expansion.

That, or we die. We die in the darkness, the flame of humanity sputtering and dwindling until it snuffs out, alone and abandoned. We cannot continue like this, hiding in our homes, afraid to leave our cities.

I wish I was someone a little more imposing, to be saying these things. It's one thing for the great Emperor of Mankind to declare that Humanity will never fall to the Alien, or for someone like the Avatar to balance the Spirit World and the Human World, but I'm just some random guy. I've been given no higher purpose, no bint lobbed a scimitar at me, and I didn't find a flaming bush or some carved tablets.

I'm just your average guy, stuck in a world the Brothers Grimm would have shuddered at. If I'm ever going to retire, or live to old age, or go home, then things need to change around here. This sense of contentment needs to go. The people need to be enraged, and need gear up for War – they need to exterminate the soulless abominations that infest their world. They need to be motivated. They need a fire in their hearts.

And that's not going to come easily. This is the kind of world where the nail that sticks up gets hammered right back down – conformity is desired, despite this weird obsession with individualized names based on colors. It's a lofty goal, and I'm not gonna be able to jump to it right away.

But I'm from a construction family, at my core. My brother builds buildings. My father did before him, and his father before him. One day, when I was a boy, my father drove me to another city, seventy seven miles away, with no fear of monsters or demons or wolves, and showed me a building that my great-uncle had built, some ninety years ago. That great-uncle, having just arrived in his new country, decided to put his family name on the building, to show that his family, like the building itself, would be there forever – that we would stand tall and strong, and last throughout the ages.

That building is still there, and our name still hangs above the door, in blocky stone letters. It's coming up on one hundred years old, and someone still works in that building. It's still making someone money, serving as a home to their business. Battered and old… but still strong. Still serving its purpose, doing its job.

My grandfather, though I never knew him, had a saying about concrete: 'Do it right or do it wrong, it'll be there for a hundred years.' Foundations, be they literal or metaphorical, are slow to shift, and will be there for centuries… until they are pried up and ripped from the earth itself. Until they are cast aside, and a new one is laid in their place.

The foundation of the Kingdom of Vale is slow and stagnant. It is shaped for consistency, for stability, and for lasting through the storm of the Grimm. It has conceded the initiative, and stands ready to defend, but never attack. Whatever expansionist thoughts it had died in the ruins of Mountain Glenn.

It's about time that someone changed all of that. The Kingdom of Atlas is trying its best, and needs no help. The Kingdom of Mistral is too far away for me to help them, and the Kingdom of Vacuo is relaxed and happy - a lost cause by this point.

No, it will have to be Vale.

But you can't just wake up one morning, and construct a building in a single day. You need to lay the foundation first. You need to level the ground, smooth it out, and get it ready for the concrete foundation, for the slab. And after you do that, you can build the frame, and then the roof, and then the walls, step by step by step, until you look up one day, and see a building before you, tall and strong and proud.

Like anything in this world that is worth the effort, it will take years, if not decades of work. But that doesn't change the inevitable.

Upon this rock, I will build my house.

* * *

For right now, I lived in a room beneath a bar. I paid my rent by taking out the trash, in both ways, and spent my days hanging out in the bar and looking tough, when I didn't have a job to do. It had taken me all of the last eight months to get to this point: going from a penniless stranger to a decently competent Aura-capable Huntsman-for-hire.

But now, after all that time, I was finally on my way up. I had a stable apartment to live in, a bunch of savings from my jobs, and the beginnings of a good reputation as a hard worker, a trustworthy merc. I had a foundation, now.

I don't like to think back to my arrival here. It was a terrifying time for me. For all that I'd faced hardships and struggle before, back on Earth, I'd never been homeless before I arrived here. I'd had nothing but the literal clothes on my back, and found myself stuck in a rural slum town, stuck facing the wail of sirens and alarms as the Grimm attacked.

I thought I was in a nightmare, and that I could just force myself to take control of the dream, to change it to a happy dream instead of a scary one.

That belief lasted me for about a minute, and I still had the scars from the Beowolf that had found me. Still had the marks on my hands from where I had plunged my fingers into the wolf's eyes, from punching its throat, from that horrifying minute of rage and fear.

Aura was the light of the Soul, they said. The embodiment of that raw, distilled essence of who a person was. I guess my Soul didn't want to die, not like that.

They say there's nothing that sharpens a man's thoughts more that the knowledge that he will be hanged in the morning. I'd respectfully disagree; I think there's nothing that sharpens those thoughts more than staring at the rope as you march to your death. And as it turns out, my stupid luck can occasionally result a minor miracle or two. The first would be my Aura awakening as the Grimm tried to eat my face off, and the second would be the Huntsmen who showed up to defend the town, saving all of us from getting overrun, killed, chewed, digested, and possibly crapped out as more Grimm - or however those things repopulated.

The way I figure, you've only got to see true evil once or twice before you really understand why people fight it. There's no moral ambiguity about fighting the Grimm; no thoughts that maybe the Grimm were just defending themselves, or that they could possibly have the moral high ground. They were killing in swathes, and I wasn't okay with just standing by and letting that shit happen. I'd picked up my Axe alone the way, and I'd never looked back.

I groaned as I rolled out of bed, dismissing those lingering thoughts as I rose, dressing myself in my worn, familiar clothing. A glance at my scroll said that it was late afternoon, and so I went out into the bar to see if anybody needed a hire a Huntsman.

The man hiring today is sallow and thin and wears a dark jacket, and his eyes fixated on me immediately, staring at me without hesitation or deviation. It's not his behavior that set him apart in the bar, keeping his table isolated despite the crowded club around him, and nor was it the bodyguard flanking him, a pale-skinned man with one hand resting on the pistol underneath his coat.

The bartender grunted as I passed him, and his eyes flicked to the sallow man, as if in warning.

The signs were all there, if you know what to look for. Which, let me tell you, is pretty fucking weird to say, especially in this case.

The bodyguard was the best disguised in theory, but he couldn't act for shit, and his very posture gives the game away. He was resting a hand on a pistol beneath his jacket, for feth's sake. Hungry eyes from the crowd watched him, waiting to see what the poorly disguised Faunus would do.

By contrast, the man sitting at the table didn't appear to care in the slightest about anyone in this bar. His eyes were a greenish-yellow, with slit pupils of pure black cutting them in half, and his forked tongue occasionally flicked out, tasting the air.

Now, I'm no bigot… but snakes were generally bad news. The snake was the deceiver, the trickster, the betrayer waiting in the grass for the right moment to rise up and strike at those walking above him. And to be fair to Mr. Snake Guy, those were all the implications that I had brought from Home, from Earth – the world of Remnant had never heard the story of the Garden of Eden.

No, to Remnant, snakes had a different kind of danger attached to them. The King Taijitu, the giant snake of black and white, was a fearsome Grimm that had a reputation for slowly advancing, looming over terrified villagers and snapping them up in one swift bite.

Snap. Gulp. No more villager.

'Will you come into my parlor?' was not a question that the Spider asked on this world. It was the question of the Snake.

"Nick," the Snake said, as I approached him.

"That's me," I replied, nodding politely. "What can I do for you, Mr…"

"Siva," the Snake said, as he gestured at the seat opposite from him.

I glanced at the bodyguard, but he didn't twitch, so I sat down at the table, and set my Axe down on top of it. The now identified 'Siva' took a moment to inspect my weapon, and then nodded, apparently judging it to be adequate.

"Hunting, guarding, or carrying?" I asked.

That's all it really came down to, in the end. Sometimes, they tried to hire me for other kinds of jobs, but… well. Let's just say that I had registered my disapproval, and that people stopped asking me to do those kinds of jobs. I put the word out very simply: if you want someone to do a morally bankrupt action, then I am not the mercenary to ask. It'd save time and money to simply ask someone else, rather than try to force me to accept a job that I do not want to do.

The major problem right now, really, wasn't the work. It was _who_ I was doing the work for.

That's the problem with being hired by a Faunus, as horrible as it is to say: you always have to wonder if you're actually just a tool being used by the White Fang. And unfortunately, that was a real risk to me, and to the rest of the mercenary Huntsman community, because if you get hired by the White Fang, you're usually about to either be lead into a trap and executed for the crime of being a Human, or you're about to be led into an assault on a Schnee Dust Company facility, usually as the first wave.

Like everything I had encountered so far on Remnant, I once tried to look at the White Fang from the perspective of Earth. Were they like any civil rights group, in the United States? Perhaps they started off like anti-apartheid protestors, and it just kept getting more and more violent? If I looked hard enough, I thought once, I could try to figure out how it had all gone wrong, how nonviolence and peaceful protest had turned into such vehement and aggressive combat. Sure, the leadership could be blamed to an extent – what I recalled of the series, from seasons one and two that I had seen, Adam Taurus had appeared to be a bit of a prick – but that didn't explain how swiftly the organization had gained ferocity, how even the common members seemed perfectly okay with the idea of simply exterminating the humans and leaving them to rot.

Honestly, I just don't know. I'm tempted to say it's just a cycle of violence, but a single change from oppressed to terrorist didn't signify a continuous cycle, and I fucking hate people who try to label something by their own biases, judge that they were correct, and then simply never consult the issue again. I just don't know what to think about the White Fang.

And in the meantime, the shadow of their bombings and their murders and their thefts continued to lurk. Here I was, an honest mercenary for hire, talking to a hopefully honest Faunus, and I couldn't help but wonder if it was a trap. That's how vast the weight of the White Fang is, that it could be felt from anywhere, at any time.

"A bit of the first two," Mr. Siva said, as he matched my gaze. "A small town has had some recent bad luck, and the Grimm has increased their predations. They had guards, but they have a few _vacancies_ to be filled."

"I don't do long term, Mr. Siva," I said, putting careful emphasis on my words. "Extermination of the Grimm, and guarding the village while I'm off-duty, that I can do."

"Nothing more than that shall be required," Mr. Siva assured me, his voice confident and smooth. "Your job would be to eliminate the threat to the village, and to defend it until that primary task is accomplished. Nothing more."

"Payment?" I asked, a spike of dislike stabbing into my stomach as I forced myself to say the words that I hated.

"Half now, half upon completion," Siva replied. "Twenty thousand in total."

I frowned, and leaned one elbow on the table as I mulled it over.

Twenty thousand definitely wasn't _bad_ , per se, and neither it was it suspiciously good money. But therein lies the crux: nobody will ever pay double the price of a merc just to get him to do something stupid – no mercenary worth tricking would ever fall for such a good deal. If you really want to get a merc to agree to a contract, you promise him good money, but not good enough money for him to start checking for asterisks.

Ten now, though… I had a few purchases that I wanted to make, and they _were_ time-sensitive, before the parts got bought out by the Huntsman Academies. I could use my own savings, of course, but with twenty thousand in total, I could spend eight of that advance on the parts, bank the two, and then bank the last ten thousand afterwards.

Less of a paycheck at the end of the day, sure, but you earn bigger paychecks for more demanding jobs, and only a suicidal idiot goes into higher risk situations without upgrading their gear. It just didn't make sense.

This… this could be just what I needed. One more job, then I can see about going legit – getting jobs for the Kingdom of Vale, or see about working private gigs for the Academies as gesture lecturer, talking about the more nitty and gritty jobs for Huntsman trainees. Hell, maybe they'll even let me teach them a little bit about hand to hand combat.

"Transportation?" I asked, keeping my voice normal.

Mr. Siva smirked, and his eyes gleamed.

"An airship convoy is scheduled to make the trip in two days' time. After your job is completed, there will be transportation booked for you aboard another airship," Mr. Siva said. " _If_ you're accepting, that is."

I gave him a smile, my lips drawn tight as I met his unyielding gaze.

* * *

Axes… they've never _really_ been regarded as good weapons. Common, definitely. Every peasant of the old times, in this world or my home, could take up a woodcutter's axe and defend his house. They'd probably die, but it was there. It was available.

Some axes were made for war, of course. If you look long enough and hard enough, you'll find that very few things have not been modified for war, in all its various forms. The spade, the scythe, and the axe – all designed for splitting or severing, but for dirt, for wheat, for wood… not skulls. It's not hard to make them adjust, however.

It wasn't even my original weapon of choice, back when I'd first landed here. _I_ wanted to use a sword and board, the sensible, practical choice, but _no_ …

My Soul, it seemed, was set on the Axe.

Aura, you see, is a very curious thing. A natural extension of energy, able to manipulated in many ways by those who could utilize it; but at the same time, lacking in any origin or source. True, Aura-users could often be seen eating more than normal people, but not all of them burned through the calories. It wasn't some kind of 'natural energy from the body', and nor was it granted by gods, or rituals, or training. Oh, the training helped, but the origin of Aura is nothing less than the Soul itself.

And Souls have always been strange concepts to wrap one's brain around. What they really were, who really 'owned' them, and what they actually did.

On Remnant, the answer to the last question was simple: they let you punch through brick walls, and dodge bullets. They let you leap small buildings and afforded some measure of protection from harm. But they were not perfect, and they did not allow total freedom. Not sentient, and not bound by any code of laws or morals or any such silly, man-made constructs… but still _aware_ , in some senses, and still capable of expressing a preference.

It was like the temperature. The humidity pressing down on you, the wind tugging at the edges of your clothes. It was like coming home after a long time away, and sighing as everything in the air just _clicked,_ and everything in the world seemed right. Some people preferred the warm climes, and some like me preferred the chill, but Aura just felt _right_ , in that same way.

Weapons were but the most obvious of those little catches that Aura seemed to have. Oh, any Aura-wielder could imbue certain objects with the light of their Soul, with extra strength, and extra speed, and all of that fancy stuff, but there was always a limit. Some things just seemed to resonate better with certain people. The more resonation you had with your weapon, the more… _you_ , the weapon was. A chunk of steel began to feel like a natural part of your arm, seeming as familiar to you as the back of your hand, and you never had difficulties with those little quirks of each weapon.

I've seen a man carry a giant hammer with one hand, as if it was as light as the air, and I've seen a woman slashing her enemies with a pair of hookswords, and never once cut herself or stopped her continuous dance of blades. It wasn't quite instant expertise, but more like… a familiarity. You would fumble less, even with an unbalanced weapon. Your hands wouldn't slip on the hilt of a blade. All those fine little motor control details, the tiny tricks and habits of a veteran, would just come naturally to you, as if you'd been using that weapon for a thousand years.

With my Axe, I could feel the weight keenly – the balance at just the right point, no matter if I was carrying it with one hand or with two. I never missed with a strike, not even by an inch. I could twirl the axe around behind my back, toss it spinning into the air, and catch it perfectly. It wasn't just that the Axe felt 'better' than a sword and shield, or a hammer, or something like that – the Axe felt _right_ , and all the others didn't. Once I had picked it up, there was no doubt in my mind that I would be using an Axe for the rest of my life.

I had some experience with Axes before, but nothing like this. I'd used simple woodaxes for splitting firewood back home, and had learned how to use the axe, the maul, and the splitter. I'd stacked cords of wood in our family basement for when the winter storms came, alongside my brother. I'd carried an axe behind the bench seat of my truck. It was normal in my rural hometown, since it was an old logging town.

But the Axe alone was… insufficient. Oh, the Axe felt amazing and all that, but it was just an Axe. Even if my skin could turn aside bullets with the help of my Aura, I didn't really have any kind of ranged option. I mean, I had, uhm, acquired a pistol, but a pistol didn't really mean much on this world. The weakest common Grimm, the giant wolves, could take multiple pistol shots without any sign of damage.

By which I mean, I had gotten into a fight and had shot a giant wolf in the head seven times, and the damn thing just kept charging and knocked me on my ass. I'd wound up kicking it to death and cursing the whole goddamn time.

So, yeah. Pistols were gonna be fucking useless to me. Maybe if I had some Dust-infused bullets, or an automatic pistol with a giant magazine, but that was even more out of reach right now. And I definitely wasn't going to use a separate Rifle, because that would involve putting down my Axe – and if I put down my Axe, then it could be knocked aside or kept away from me, and that would just be even fucking worse than not having a ranged weapon. I could almost certainly kill a Beowolf or two with my bare hands, because of Aura-enhancement, but it would take much longer, whereas I could dispatch a Beowolf with a single chop from the Axe.

Which is where all those incredibly bullshit hybrid weapons come from. Sword with shotguns on the tip, scythes that turn into sniper rifles… all manner of completely insane weapons that do not make any goddamn sense.

But those insane weapons allowed both a ranged and melee option – and since Grimm attacks usually involve a giant swarm of wolves or giant swarms of bears, or giant swarms of, well, any kind of giant animals. Having a ranged weapon in those cases allows you to keep your distance, so that you don't just charge in and get ganked by multiple Grimm at once.

With a rifle built into a sword, a decent Aura-user can kite the Grimm, thinning out the numbers of Grimm without endangering themselves by diving into melee range, and without the difficulty of swapping between two full-sized weapons while dodging claws and teeth.

 _I_ would have preferred to have some kind of heavy automatic rifle with a tough bayonet, but I was stuck with an Axe.

The simple solution was to modify my Axe, putting some kind of gun in the wooden haft of the Axe, so that I could shoot people without having to set down my Axe. Like, with the blade of the Axe pointing down from the tip of the barrel, so that I could shoulder it and fire at enemies, then easily sweep it around to strike with the Axe's blade.

Huh.

When you put it like that, it's… kinda understandable that people say that all Huntsman were crazy.

* * *

Six hours later, the bulk transport airship I was hitching a ride on pulled in for a landing at the rural town of Arcuda.

From above, Arcuda didn't look like too bad of a place to live. The trees had been trimmed back away from the settlement, which was located in a small valley of a mountain ridge that poked out of the vast forest. The town's defensive walls were built into the protective ridges, and there were clear lines of sight for about a hundred yards around them.

The buildings looked squat and square, with good arching roofs to help with the rain; which seemed to be the running theme of the place. There was an aqueduct of dark stone on the side closest to the mountain, which looked dry but was probably designed for helping with sudden floods and rushes of water sliding down from the mountain. The closer the buildings were to the mountain, the more they rose up, like the tiers of a cake. The streets were walkways of long staircases, with a smooth chute between each side of the street for the water to drain down.

The building themselves were older, and looked much less like the modern buildings of Vale or Atlas and more like the cobbled stone buildings that you sometimes saw in Europe. Some of the newer buildings, near the top of the settlement, were made of uniform blocks stacked atop each other, but most looked rougher, with irregular stones mated to some kind of cement. It was like a miniature Omashu, from Avatar, but without Earthbenders to make everything smooth and even. This was a work of centuries, of persistence and toil with tools, rather than a calculated perfection that came from magical powers. There were alleyways that seemed too thin to walk through, and spurs of streets that had no houses on them; the city had moved on, but the old structures had stayed in place.

I could see some open fields on the far side of the settlement, where the land was flatter, and wondered for a moment why the Arcudans – Arcudians? – hadn't built their airport down there, where it would've been much easier. Building the darn thing where it actually was, near at the highest point of the settlement, must have been a bitch to do. The foundation alone…

Then I blinked, and took a closer look. Stop thinking like you're on Earth, I scolded myself. Think like a local, think _defense_.

Suddenly, it all clicked. The tiered, slowly rising levels of the town, combined with the fields down at the lower, flatter ground. It was all one big killzone – designed so that if the Grimm got through the walls, the Arcudans could pour as much fire at them as possible, while keeping their evacuation point safely defended at the back, as far as possible away from the likely point of attack. They could keep evacuating civilians while still fighting off the Grimm, and fight down to the last possible second. Hell, it even looked like they could flood all the lower fields by just blowing up the aqueduct's cistern – washing away the smaller Grimm and slowing down the larger ones.

I could imagine what it looked like, when there was a gun atop every roof, when all the tiers were firing down on the fields. A veritable wall of gunfire and Dust blazing away at one narrow chokepoint. The entire city was a defensive fortification.

Goddamn.

These people certainly don't think _small_ , do they?

* * *

The mayor of Arcuda nodded in respect as the main gates started to rumble open. He was an older man with thick, corded arms and a speckled black-and-grey beard. His face was plain, and had some signs of smiles in the lines of his cheeks, but there were no smiles when he greeted me. He'd only said ten words to me since I landed, and seven of those were "You're the Hunter? Let's get this done."

I liked him already.

The guards atop the wall had waved as we walked in silence through the fields, just a few minutes earlier, but they hasn't come down from their posts. They looked… reassured? Well, at least they were putting on a good face to their feelings – I'm sure that plenty of them were actually nervous, but it wouldn't do to show the townsfolk that.

Because all the eyes in town were watching us. The workers in the fields had stood up, straw hats shielding their eyes as they stared, leaning on tools. The children in the streets had swarmed around us as we strode down through giant staircase of Arcuda, whispering to each other as they watched. The girls had blushed and giggled, and the boys had loudly declared that they would be just as strong 'as that Huntsman is!'

My Axe rested lightly on my shoulder, and I was painfully aware of the stares. Sure, the children were happy and excited, but the grownups had watched with expectation in their gaze. If I came back, they would probably cheer and celebrate for me… and if I didn't, they would already have packed their evacuation bags, just in case.

I wasn't exactly unfamiliar with having people watching me with that same expectation, that measuring gaze. I'd taught karate back home, and the parents had always been a constant presence to the side, watching carefully as I taught their kids how to punch and kick – always evaluating, always assessing.

But there were so many of them, now. I'd only ever had to deal with ten, maybe twelve concerned parents watching my lessons back Home, but Arcuda had around five to ten _thousand_ people living in it, and most of them had turned out to watch. They watched me from their balconies, from behind closed doors, from the other side of the street.

I felt like a Hero of Old, walking through a medieval town on my way to slay the fearsome dragon, and for all that the mood appeared at first to be celebratory, there was a tension to every step.

If I failed…

No.

None of that, now.

"So, I'm guessing that you've scouted out where they're hiding out?" I asked the Mayor, rolling my shoulders and loosening up in preparation.

The Mayor gave me an odd look, but shrugged and pulled out a Scroll.

"Follow this map," he said, as I tapped his Scroll with mine, transferring the data over. "That's the best bet. If not, come back, rest for the night, and try the second best guess."

"Lemme guess," I sighed. "And if that doesn't work, we just keep going?"

The Mayor nodded.

"Well, at least I have a map," I pointed out. "This would be a lot harder without one. Thank you for that, boss."

"It'll still be hard," the Mayor said bluntly.

"Yeah, I wasn't gonna say that," I admitted. "It gives me a nice feeling, pretending that every job is going to be a cakewalk. Like pretending that Santa's real."

That earned me another odd look from the Mayor, who didn't say another word as he led me to the gates.

* * *

I walked out in the forest, and followed the trail as I had been told. An hour passed like that, just walking quietly along and watching the trees dance in the wind.

The woods rustled, and the smell of pine was constant. The trees were old, and enormous in size; thirty feet around, maybe more. It reminded me of the photos of pioneers in the Pacific Northwest – of ten men sitting on the stump of a leviathan evergreen tree, of the six log trucks that it took to haul just that one tree out of the woods.

This… this was Old Growth. True, pristine old growth. Never logged, never touched. The primeval forest.

I set my Axe down for a moment, and rested a hand on one of the gigantic trees. I looked up and tried to see the top, but couldn't make it out through the obscuring branches. For a long moment, it seemed like time had just frozen. Sunlight trickled through the canopy of aged branches, and the moss and ferns around me were so achingly familiar.

I blinked, and it seemed for an instant like I was just out for a walk in the woods back home, back on Earth. My familiar wool-lined coat was unbuttoned and open, showing the purple v-neck shirt beneath it, exposing my chest to the playful trickle of the wind, ever-present. My light sling-style backpack could have been carrying hiking supplies, not emergency rations. I could pretend that my Axe was just a walking stick. There was no humidity to the air, just a brisk breeze that carried the smell of the Forest.

Then there was a growl from behind me, and I couldn't pretend to be Home any longer. My clothes were all the same, but there was an Axe in my now-scarred hands.

The Beowolf came charging out of the woods at full speed – appearing around a tree and launching headfirst at me, both forelimbs lunging for me in a feline, pouncing motion.

They were strange animals, to my eyes. Oh, I'd seen giant versions of virtually every animal in videogames and fantasy books, but it was the bones that bothered me the most. They protruded like spikes of armor, and were symmetrical. I'd seen strange bodyshapes just as much as giant animals, but it was strange to see something that I would have expected from the Infested or the Flood on an animal that otherwise looked perfectly natural, if much larger than one would expect.

The bones. I always wondered where the bones came from. Did they grow on the Grimm, normally and naturally, or were they related to the size? Would an Alpha Beowolf, one of the massive pack leaders, have its own bone protrusions be larger than a normal Beowolf's simply because it was the Alpha? Or did it become the Alpha _because_ of its larger segments of bone carapace? Was it da Boss because it was the biggest and the strongest, or was it the biggest and the strongest because it was da Boss?

I snapped up my Axe and turned to face the Grimm, stepping out into a horizontal swing like I was chopping down a tree. The Beowolf tried to step to the side, to evade, but I stepped forward as I swung, and the blade of my Axe slammed home in its side.

The Beowolf let out a cry, and collapsed to the ground, with its side partially caved in.

I stepped up to finish it off, and another howling cry erupted from the woods. Then another, and another, and another again.

Ahhh… _fuck_. I'd walked right into a pack of the damn wolves.

The second one came at me from straight ahead, and I slammed my Axe down on it's skull in an overhead strike, a smooth motion born from long practice. The wolf's mask of bone split in half as my Axe struck, and it fell.

My Axe was stuck, though, and I had to quickly yank it out as the third Beowolf came crashing out of the undergrowth. With a quick pull upwards on the haft, and then a quick push downwards, the blade sprang free, and I had my weapon back.

Hips and shoulders, I reminded myself. Swing the hips, rotate the shoulders, and put your whole body into the strike. Like baseball. Of course, that would probably be more helpful if I'd actually _played_ baseball…

The fourth Beowolf roared as it bounded into sight, and then the fifth, and the sixth.

See, it's moments like this that I appreciate the simplicity of an Axe. None of that fancy 'dodge, pirouette, slash, evade' kind of garbage, where you have to make sure to keep your distance. Where you have to think about complex angles and where to jump, and how to spin, and all that nonsense.

No, no, see: Axes are simple weapons. You find the biggest enemy in your path, and you chop it into kindling. Then you find the next biggest and repeat the chopping, and so on, until you've run out of enemies.

The Axe swung across my side, crunching bone as it slammed into a Beowolf's ribs. The wolf wheezed, its hacking snarl cut short.

Huh. Must've punctured one of its lungs.

In the moment it took me to think that, another Beowolf leapt, coming in from my side and smashing into me.

My feet left the grass in a hurry, and the forest blurred as I smacked straight into one of those old trees I'd been admiring earlier. I could feel a dull throb in my left shoulder, and there was a stinging pain in my left hand.

The Beowolf didn't give me any time to inspect that pain, however. It dove straight after me, mouth open wide and dozens of razor-sharp teeth aiming straight for me.

I only had one hand on my Axe, and my left hand was screaming in pain every time I tried to clench it into a fist, so I didn't try to tackle this wolf head-on.

Instead, I ducked, dropping low to the ground and diving to the side. I rolled as I landed, and bit back a little grunt of pain as I tumbled over a couple exposed roots, banging my back.

Beowolves were fast, though, and while this one jumped over me, missing its bite, the damn thing managed to bring up all of its paws, and it landed on the side of the tree like it was flat ground – anime level bullshit, I snarled in my mind – hanging there for an instant and then jumping straight after me.

My left hand was still in pain, but I'd forced it onto the haft of my Axe all the same, and I stood tall as the beast launched forward.

The Beowolf jumped from a couple yards up on that tree, and was diving down towards me… but apparently, gravity didn't seem to agree with the wolf. Instead of accelerating as it dove towards the ground, the wolf was slowing in mid-air, as if it had jumped straight up rather than down at me.

The wolf's victorious howl trailed off, as its lightning fast lunge turned slower and slower, like there was a bungee cord tied around its leg. It almost looked cartoonish, the way its canine face shifted in confusion, its legs stretching further back as it stretched out, reaching for my face and falling just short.

I smirked.

The wolf slowed, and came to an almost complete stop right in front of my face, like it was being put on a stand for my inspection. Like putting a baseball on a tee. The Beowolf looked confused for a moment, and then my Axe came up to meet it.

The beast's head was crushed backwards into its chest, and the wolf's strange inertia snapped backwards, sending its carcass flying backwards as if shot from a cannon. One of the other Beowolves happened to be coming up behind it, and the first wolf slammed it unexpectedly, sending them both into a solid tree trunk. The two wolves fell to a heap at the base of the tree, and they didn't get up.

The last wolf in the pack stopped in mid-motion, as if unsure that it had made the right choice in attacking this human.

Grimm… they're not exactly _stupid_. Unintelligent, sure, but like any animal, they have at least a shadow of a self-preservation instinct.

This Beowolf was a fine example of that: faced with the death of five of its fellows – packmates – and it realized that maybe, just maybe, this would not be the easiest prey in the world to hunt.

Maybe, if it had another few moments of time, it might have made the sensible decision to run away, while it still had its life.

With one swift motion, I hefted my Axe over my head, both hands sliding down to the bottom of the handle. I'd tossed a few throwing axes in my time, but those were smaller, and were meant from throwing. But I didn't hesitate, tossing the Axe end over end with a grunt of effort, whipping my arms down and throwing my back into it, sending the Axe straight at the Beowolf.

The wolf was still staring straight at me, shocked, when the Axe sprouted out of its upper chest. Like, one moment there was a wolf staring at me like I had stolen its candy, and the next moment it was wearing a decorative axe necklace.

It teetered there for a moment, then crashed down face first on the ground… which probably just drove the Axe further into its chest.

I took a calming breath, and very carefully did not collapse on the ground.

It's all the small things, I think, that bug me the most about these woods. No birds were singing, there were no squirrels in the trees, and no butterflies were winging their way through the clearing. The only sound is the rustle of the ferns in the wind, the only sight the slow dissolving of the wolf corpses.

Ah… now my Axe is gonna be covered in that oily Grimm blood crap. Wonderful.

* * *

I frowned as I looked up at the carved wood of the gigantic tree before me.

A glance down at the map confirmed that this was, apparently, the last landmark for the trail. The tree was trimmed, and had no branches on the lower half of the trunk… just carved, swirling symbols that circled around the trunk.

"The 'tree of remembrance'," I read out loud. "Huh."

It certainly fit the name. I could see everything from stick figures to Greco-styled humans walking around the circumference of the smooth, bark-less tree. Carved images of houses being built, of walls being raised, and then of the distinctive black shapes of the Grimm coming in, of blood being spilled and towns burning down.

Monuments of remembrance aren't always the happiest things, on Remnant.

"Okay…" I murmured to myself, pulling my Scroll back out and looking at the map. "Five hundred yards south of the tree of remembrance."

I took a moment to rest a hand on the tree, and wondered how the ancients had managed to get the smooth tree to remain this way, to keep it alive despite the loss of all that bark. It definitely showed care and love… the depth of the carvings showed scale and three dimensions, the angle of the cut… this was a work of many years.

The silence of the forest seemed fitting, now.

A quick glance at my Scroll's compass function, and I left, walking away quietly. It just didn't seem right to be loud, right now. Not in this place.

A couple minutes of walking later, I looked back down at my Scroll.

"It said ' _south_ ', right?" I asked the air, hoping for a moment that someone was going to step out of the woods and clarify that no, I wanted a thousand hundred yards in the _other_ direction, away from the creepy cave.

Did I mention the cave? Because it was a pretty goddamn creepy cave.

It was a low pit dug into the side of the hill. It would've reminded me a little of a hobbit hole, if the edge of the cave hadn't been from some dark, greasy looking stone that looked like almost volcanic in origin. The light penetrated a little bit into the cave, showing me smooth stone, likely softened by the rain dripping into the mouth of the cave, all that condensation and rainwater wearing down the stone over time.

"'There is a place of great evil in the wilderness'," I quoted slowly with a mocking tone, making a face as I did. "Christ. It's gotta be a frigging cave, doesn't it?"

It did fit the signs, though. A place in which the Grimm could accumulate, building up their numbers over the years. Building until they spilled out and started attacking the walls of Arcuda, but hidden enough within the cave to be unnoticed until they had that critical mass.

The cave was perfect for that. The mouth of the cave was low, but past the opening, it looked like it was actually fairly spacious, unlike most normal cave systems. Maybe that was a product of the generally fucked-up nature of Remnant? That all the caves had to be spooky caverns, instead of small crevice-like spaces like any normal, logical world would have?

There was that emotional thing, too. I didn't really buy into it, not really, but I'd met a guy over the last year that I'd been stranded who had spoken of the idea fervently, in hushed whispers – that the Grimm weren't just supernatural, or just attracted to negative emotions, but that they were _formed_ of those negative emotions. That they fed on them, that they came into being based on how powerful the negative emotions of the nearby humans were.

And, well, let's be honest… nothing really screamed out "do not enter on pain of horrible death" more than a scary cave in the monster-infested forest. The place had probably been the subject of local ghost stories for as long as there had been people living here.

I sighed, and tightened my grip on the Axe.

"Friggin' caves," I muttered. "Friggin' quests. Friggin' Diablo levels of spooky bullshit."

Then I dug the battered maglight out of my slim backpack, took up my axe in one hand, and stepped carefully into the darkness.


	2. Chapter 2

Xxxx

Xxx

Xx

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* * *

I went caving once, back in my freshman year of highschool, with a good portion of my class. It had been tight, cramped, and very interesting. I wasn't claustrophobic, and enjoyed the way that the cave had forced all the naturally energetic kids to slow down and look around, lest they crack their skulls on the rock.

We'd gone to a fairly large cave, as far as I understand it. Nothing like those gigantic caverns with vast, open spaces and piles of gleaming crystals or stalactites, which only seemed to exist in photographs. To move from one little 'room' of the cave system to another on my trip, we'd all had to duck, crawl, and squeeze through small spaces, though we could stand up once we were in the next room.

From what I'd heard, most 'real' caves were even smaller than that. Places where you had to squeeze between two rock faces, where you crawled using your fingers and toes, and where the end result was a tiny, cramped hole that Nature had left behind as an accident.

Real life, you see, isn't really like a video game. If you wander out to a cave system in the real world and spend a couple hours dredging through the tiny confines of a cave system, you wouldn't emerge out the other side to a beautiful, gorgeous vista and a shiny treasure chest. The end of a cave system simply meant that there was no way to move any farther, not that you had returned to the surface in some more grand location than where you had entered.

Reality, unfortunately, appeared to have come to an arrangement with the world of Remnant, wherein they both politely pretended that the other didn't exist.

This cave system was huge. I could have driven a car through the mouth of this sucker. The walls were spread out and tall, and the top of the cave sat ten feet above the ground. Some of the apartments that I had lived in were more cramped than this!

Nonetheless, I walked slowly, carefully forward. One step at a time, carefully watching around me for movement. The roof of the cave seemed stable enough, and my footing wasn't going to come loose, but this was enemy territory – their home, their lair, and I was intruding. Any animal will fight the hardest to protect their home, and I was like a burglar walking right in through the front door.

The mag-light I held in my left hand was decent illumination, and had taken surprisingly well to my attempts to imbue it with my Aura over the last few months. It was no weapon, of course, and I could easily do more damage with my bare hands than with it, but if I had to drop it to the rocky cave floor, it wouldn't break.

Twenty yards straight into the mouth of hell, the tunnel curved downwards, like a ramp.

I glanced backwards, at the light of the forest behind me, which already seemed brighter and more luminous as my eyes gradually adjusted to the dimmer light of the cave.

Getting lost would be one of the worst possible things to happen to me in here, save for getting chomped into bits by a Grimm, and I really wasn't eager to get buried under a full mountain's worth of rocks if the cave decides to collapse on top of my head.

I'm not claustrophobic. Stick me in a small room and give me a book, and I'll sit there happier than a clam in high tide. But I am sane, so if you stick me underneath a shifty ceiling with a couple million pounds of rock overhead, don't be surprised when I jump at the first ominous rumble.

A good, deep breath helped settle my rising stomach. I closed my eyes for a moment, and my fingers tapped out a beat on the haft of my Axe.

I started walking again, my Axe resting on my right shoulder. I swept the mag-light back and forth as I walked down the ramp, deeper into the earth, looking for side paths and branching tunnels, but I found none.

Forward, not back, the old quote sprang to mind. That's how the game is played.

My head bobbed in time to an invisible chorus, and my grip tightened on the Axe. My backpack was strapped on tight, and wouldn't shake or flap around when I start fighting. Time to go to work.

The first Grimm charged out of the darkness in front of me with a warbling cry, and my Axe came crashing down from my shoulder, slamming the smooth, scaly body of the Grimm into the rock. Black, oily Grimm blood oozed out in the light of my mag-light, and I brought the Axe down once more, just to be sure. A burst of some liquid splashed out across my workman's coat, and a few drops hit my face, warm and slimy.

I tensed, and waited for the next Grimm to spring out of the darkness, but none did.

After a minute had passed, I looked down at the corpse of the monster at my feet, and I frowned.

This… this…

What _was_ this?

A lizard?

I thought there'd be more wolves, maybe a bear or two down here… but a _lizard_?

What the hell?

Black skin, leathery in texture, and the same bright white mask... this was definitely some kind of Grimm, but it didn't look like any that I'd seen before. Experimentally, I tipped the corpse over with a nudge of my boot and used my Axe to carefully pry open its jaws; exposing rows of sharp, jagged teeth without doing anything as idiotic as sticking my fingers in a monster's mouth. Unlike Beowolves or Ursae, there weren't any protruding spikes of bone sticking out of the lizard's body. Instead, patches of circular, bone-like scales spread out from the monster's shoulders down, like white polka-dots on the dark skin.

Even more strangely, the lizard only had two arms, and no legs, appearing to use its thick tail as a third limb.

A faint trickle of something at the back of my head hit me, and I stood there for a few seconds, trying to figure out where I had seen this creature before. Was it in the second season of RWBY, when Vale was attacked from underground? I couldn't quite remember.

Then an image sprang into my mind, and I inspected the lizard-Grimm again, trying to pretend that its skin was green.

"… _Dodongos?"_ I muttered in surprise.

I blinked, trying to dispel the image, but it stuck fast, and the back of my head started furiously swearing at the front of my head for refusing to believe that in a world where giant wolves attacked little red riding hood and where the Wizard of Oz ran a highschool for heroes, there couldn't possibly be a goddamn Dodongo.

I looked around, and frantically hoped that the cave didn't have those frigging fire bats or any giant spiders. If they did, I was fucking _done_.

* * *

I ran into another dozen of the Grimm Dodongo-things, one at a time, over the course of the next hour, as I thoroughly explored the unnatural cave.

Fucking Dodongos, man.

There were a few branching paths away from the main tunnel, but they all ended in small, tight spaces that no Grimm could have squeezed through, and resembled _actual_ caves more than this… freeway-like abomination of a cavern that I was walking through.

And yes, before anyone asks, I had smacked the walls a couple times with my Axe to make sure that I wasn't walking down into the throat of a giant monster. Han Solo had taught me well.

But all this expedition had really done was give me time to think. I usually planned out my thoughts best when I was walking anyway, and there was nothing to aid those paranoid thoughts than a jaunt through a spooky cave.

The briefing that Siva had given me (and which the Mayor had confirmed) said that they were being attacked by rampaging groups of Beowolves, and the occasional Ursa or two. There had been no mention of lizards or anything like that, and I'd seen no Beowolves in this cave. Despite caves being good hiding spots for actual bears, that was one of those pieces of information that I had carried over from Earth, and I didn't have a clue if that was actually true or not on Remnant.

And there were none of the other usual signs of any Grimm living here. A few scratches on the cave walls that looked like they had come from the claws of the Dodongos, but they were rare and scattered; if there had been more Grimm in the cavern, scratches would be everywhere, on practically every surface. There also wasn't any human bones or remains in the cave, whether recent or otherwise. No human bodies, no scraps of clothing or splashes of dried blood.

All in all, this looked to be a bust. The buildup of Grimm that had been harassing Arcuda definitely wasn't living in this cavern, and I probably should have turned around and started walking back towards Arcuda before the sun set, so that I could get some sleep and hit the second target tomorrow.

But…

The cave itself was still bugging me.

The weird, Dodongo-lookalikes weren't that strange, because I knew that Grimm came in dozens of forms, each one exotically different. I didn't think that I was arrogant enough to assume that I knew every single one of those different Grimm species, so I could buy that this specific lizard-monster just lived in caves only, and didn't roam the untamed Wilderness near Vale.

What really bugged me was the _size_ of the damn tunnel. Each of the branching paths that I had explored had all ended fairly shortly, shrinking into tiny crevices soon after they split off from the main path, and yet the main path continued deeper and deeper, stretching on into the underdark of Remnant. It was lofty and high-ceilinged despite having no man-made structural supports. Hell, even the ground was mostly flat. You still had to watch each step, but if I had to sprint down this tunnel, I probably could, without suddenly running into a sharp drop or protruding stalagmite.

I'd been walking for an hour, and even with the breaks to investigate those side passages and kill the lizard-Grimm, I had to have walked at least a kilometer by now, and it all went vaguely in the same direction as the cave mouth had gone – at least, so I thought, but my sense of direction wasn't always the best – and that would mean that I'd left the low foothills of the forest behind, and had started to enter the low, looming mountain range that Arcuda was nestled within.

And that was just another strangeness to tack onto the oddity of the sheer size and spaciousness of the tunnel itself. Caves just didn't go in straight lines like this one did, they usually were winding crisscrossing descents that were more _vertical_ than horizontal.

The main path of the cave was spacious, and even if there were no visible supports or braces, it certainly looked like a mine shaft or some kind of man-made cavern. It traveled roughly in a straight line for a long stretch of time. And it was disturbingly large; if they'd had to, I could see the entire city of Arcuda slipping inside this cave and holing up inside it for the winter with ample room for provisions, even for all ten or so thousand people who lived there.

Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.

I dug my Scroll out of the easy-access pocket on the front of my backpack, and checked the time. Assuming that I kept a brisk walking pace to get out of the cave and ran at an Aura-enhanced jog back to Arcuda, I could get back before the sun set… but only if I left right _now._

I took another look at the darkness of the continuing darkness in front of me, taunting me with the unknown that lay within, and glanced back into the equally dark section that was behind me, towards the surface. My mag-light shone on the smooth cave walls, scattering across the few pools of tepid drip-water from the ceiling.

 _This is going to keep me up all night_ , I realized. Even if I left right now and went back to Arcuda and ate a hearty meal and tried to sleep, I would just be lying in bed, tossing and turning and thinking about this goddamn cave.

I swore softly under my breath, and slipped the Scroll away. There was no point in trying to send a message to the Mayor; even if I could get reception beneath however many hundreds of feet of dirt and rock, I wouldn't have anything to say beyond "May not be back by sundown, but I'm not dead yet."

It's a bright, happy world that we live in, folks, don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

Theoretically, I was capable of searching and fighting all night long. I had survival packages of food, and a simple trick of Aura would help ignite a compact campstove in my pack; allowing me to grab a bite of food and some hot chocolate to keep going. I didn't quite want to break into the two packets of instant-coffee that I also had, since I'd never actually had coffee before, but I suppose I could drink one of those to keep myself awake if the hot chocolate didn't work.

Aura would help keep me going, of course. So long I didn't take too many hits and deplete my reserves of Aura, I could keep using it to slowly remove my exhaustion and keep myself going.

But, of course, the problem with that was that the more I used my Aura to keep myself awake, the less hits I would be able to take if I actually did run into the large concentration of Grimm that were bothering Arcuda. The less I would be able to push Aura into the swings of my Axe and the weaker my attacks would be.

"Ah… fuck it," I sighed.

I slapped a dirty hand across my face, shook my head a couple times, and started to psyche myself up to continue onward.

Get it done, the back of my head whispered. Don't go back to the city disappointed.

 _Oh, shut up you_ , I thought back at it.

Onward and onward, deeper and deeper.

Let's just hope there isn't a damn dragon at the bottom of this cave.

* * *

"Fuck," I said to the empty air, as I stared at the impossible sight before me.

I'd walked for another half hour, and hadn't met a single damn Grimm in all that time.

"Fuck, fuckity, fuck," I said, conversationally, with a dissonant tone of happiness in my voice.

The blade of my Axe tapped against the smooth, dusty stonework. I listened carefully as it _tinged_ in the quiet, but the _ting_ definitely sounded like stone, and not wood or papier-mâché or some other material that might have been used to fake the giant stonework door that stood before me.

I backed up a step, and took another look at the gigantic carved stone door that stood before me, plugging up the underground tunnel like a very large cork. Glyphs and carved words adorned it, but I couldn't read them, and they barely seemed to be the same alphabet as the Roman one that all of Remnant used today.

"Fucking fuck," I stated sincerely, as if the words would ward off the absurdity of _a giant fucking stone door in the middle of an underground tunnel_.

Five minutes of pleasant sounding swear-words later, I wound down my recitation of the Litany of Fucks and sat my tired ass down on the tunnel floor.

The report that the Mayor of Arcuda had given me had said absolutely nothing about a giant stone door that looked like it had been dropped out of ancient Egypt. Nothing about anything other than an 'old cave, suspected to be housing a herd of Beowolves.'

Oh, this was just great. Recruited by a literal snake to go kill some Grimm, and stumbling onto some kind of ancient gate a kilometer down a creepy tunnel in the middle of the monster-filled woods.

 _Where's a redshirt when you need them_ , I thought to myself morosely.

 _Let's wind this back_ , I thought, closing my eyes for a moment and reaching for my water bottle. A long, slow sip of lukewarm water helped settle my thoughts. _Wind it back, and figure it out._

 _Think, Nick, use that thing you call a brain… think!_

You gotta start from the beginning. That's how it always starts. Start from the beginning and work through the data until you find out where the problem originates.

It's a simple trick: pretend that you're giving a report to somebody. That you're explaining yourself to somebody of authority. I've always found that doing that helps me center my thoughts.

Within the Tunnel, I had found the main 'tunnel' to be suspiciously wide and tall, without supporting beams or braces of manmade design. Smooth walls of natural stone, not quarried or inserted in place. The branching paths had been much smaller, and fit the 'normal' size and dimensions of caves, unlike the main tunnel.

There were small numbers of an unknown form of Grimm that closely resembles two-legged lizards, and which I killed easily… but there were no Beowolves, nor Ursae, which were the Grimm that the Client had specified as the targets.

And then after an hour and a half, I found a giant stone door that blocked off the remaining tunnel: a stone door that appeared to have been carved out of the same local stone.

Door: why a door? What was the indication that made me call the obstruction a 'door'? What does the door look like, how does it appear to be constructed? How the fuck did the creators even manage to open the damn thing?

Not just decorative, either. If it was, then the slab in the middle of the door that looked like it slid out of place wouldn't have been necessary, and decorations could simply be carved into a larger rock like the glyphs had been. This thing looked like it could open.

Conclusion: a barrier. Not just a stone door, but a Gate, to keep intruders out in the tunnel and others within.

I looked up from my ruminations, and scanned around the rest of the tunnel.

Tunnel.

Why 'tunnel', specifically? What make this tunnel _not_ seem like a cave? The dimensions, the size, the space, obviously, but what else?

Stalactites. Where were the _stalactites_?

Sure enough, when I panned my mag-light up, I couldn't see any spires of rock pointing downwards. There were some bumps, and ridges, and what looks like little dots that might, in a couple thousand years, be a proper stalactite, but they were small, and I could barely see them from the ground.

How long did it take stalactites to form? The slow dripping of water, that's how they're made, I knew, but… how long?

Because if that really was a _gate_ , and had been made by something or somebody, then the lack of stalactites could also fit in – after all, I'd reflected earlier on how I wasn't eager to be standing beneath a cave ceiling that could be unstable and might collapse on me – so if somebody else had been sending people down here, then they likely would have thought that same thing, and would have removed the stalactites to reduce the danger.

Which would be why the walls were so wide, why the ceiling was so tall. Nobody sane would want unstable spikes of rock dangling overhead, where a minor quake or rumble of the earth could send them crashing down below.

I'd thought, idly, that I could drive a car into the tunnel back when I'd first walked in… but how true was that? Had the society that built the Gate driven animal-drawn wagons into this tunnel? Maybe this actually [I]was[/I] a winter hideaway, back in the old days when humans were nothing more than wandering tribes struggling to survive in a world full of Grimm.

So… why hadn't they remembered this?

I mean, that's a bit of an assumption that the people of Arcuda hadn't remembered the cave, but… you'd think that the Mayor would have said something like "The first target is an old cave that our people lived in a couple thousand years ago, so we think that the Grimm might be living in it now."

Good God, this was tripping all my goddamn nerves now.

 _That's a thick door_ , the back of my head murmured. _Why make it so thick? What did they need to keep out?_

I almost thought the next, obvious question, but quickly restrained myself before I could jinx it any further.

Backing up, I sat down on an outcropping of rock and quietly cradled my head between my hands as I bid goodbye to thelast chance of this being a simple or easy mission.

* * *

I started heading back to Arcuda a few minutes later, after scarfing down an energy bar and drinking some water.

There wasn't much I could actually do about that door, really. I had a simple choice: open the creepy ancient stone door, or _don't_ open the creepy ancient stone door. It didn't take long to decide.

I mean… who on earth would be stupid enough to do that? Even Remnant's movies would have instilled the average Huntsman with a general savviness to how these kinds of movies worked. You don't read out loud from ancient books, you don't steal ancient treasures, and you don't open ancient doors.

Sure, the odds were likely that it really was just a random stone door left over from ancient times, rather than anything supernatural or horror-related, but _I_ wasn't gonna be taking that chance.

My decision was easy enough to make: I started back towards Arcuda, using my Aura to speed up my brisk jogging pace, and I'd ask some questions of the Mayor. I definitely did not want to do anything until I had as much information as possible, and the only source of that might just be the local folklore.

Oral history survives fairly well over the long passage of years, especially when books may be vulnerable to being left behind when the Grimm destroy a village. To share a story, you just need to make it sound cool and tell it to the village children around a big ol' campfire (probably while the adults were getting drunk), and repeat it every year of so. It'll stick in their memories, and they'll repeat the tradition with their own kids… even if it's just to have an excuse to get drunk.

The jog back went quickly, but 'quickly' is a relative term when you're out in the woods. My jogging strides were long, each step boosted by a tiny smidge of aura, and they ate up the ground. It wasn't anything crazy, and I was only moving as fast as I could sprint without the use of Aura – hardly a flash step or anything like that.

But it was sustainable over long distances, it kept my bodyweight centered so that I could side-step and avoid obstacles, and it didn't make too much noise. That was more important than ever, on Remnant.

To some people, the woods are just a quaint throwback to the life before the rise of concrete and steel, of the cities of metal. The woods were just a bunch of trees, some ferns and bushes, and the occasional squirrel. Nothing more.

Those people are idiots.

To being to understand how much goes on in the woods, whether here in this monstrous place or back home on Earth, you have to be silent. There are animals in every little nook and cranny of the woods, and so many of them hide the moment that they hear the ungainly crashing of the bumbling humans in their forest, like a drunk in a family reunion.

The very air is alive in the woods, if you know how to look. Bees and mosquitos and dragonflies, with insects in the loam and squirrels in the trees and all manner of life in every direction.

Those animals are all aware of each other. Like a tuned orchestra, or a crew of rowers, they can hear when something is wrong, they can _feel_ when something is out of rhythm. Humans are a little aware of it, but barely so. A man might notice that none of the birds are singing, but he won't instinctively run for cover because of it. The animals of the forest, on the other hand, definitely will.

I won't say that I'm 'in tune with nature' or anything silly like that. I'm not a bird-watcher or an animal conservationist or a park ranger, or a member of any of those hobbies or professions that could create such a bond… but I am from the woods, in my own way.

From the muddy banks of the Wishkah to the red clay of Georgia, I've wandered the forest enough to know how to move quietly, how to keep the deer from jumping and the birds from fleeing. I'm no expert, and many of the hunters back home would laugh at how mediocre my skills were, but I'm good enough for this purpose.

When you boil it down to purely physical descriptions, it's just an intense focus on your muscle control and a careful eye on the path before you. Watching every step as you run, shifting your feet just a few inches to avoid that stick, to miss that patch of loose gravel, to minimize how much noise your feet make as they slap the dirt. Toe-striking as you run, careful about the precise placement of where your foot goes.

It helps you zone out, if you get decently good at it. Your brain focuses on those small details, and it's easy to slip into an almost meditative state as you run. Other benefits include reducing the chance of rolling your ankle, and most importantly to me, keeping your ass quiet, so that you don't attract giant monsters to your location by charging through the brush like a brown bear during mating season.

It was a tense, long run back after I'd left the cave. The sun was just setting fully, and the last streaks of orange were slipping away as the black of night approached. The forest seemed quiet and still, unnaturally so, and I ran with my Axe carried in one hand, ready to fight if any Beowulf or Ursa _ **e**_ (Latin roots, dammit, I don't care if the locals call them Ursa **i** instead) appeared out of the bushes.

But none did, and I kept running.


End file.
